Free Shadow Warrior 2 on GOG, and how I made it work on Linux
October 4th 2018
For the 10th anniversary of GOG, we got a nice suprise from the Polish company. People could vote from 3 games (Shadow Warrior 2, Superhot and Firewatch), to be free for a limited time. While I really wanted to have Superhot, because I thought it is an interesting game, and despite my small effort in the fediverse, campaigning till the last hour (this sentence is so hyperbole, and funny, I laugh as I write this).
Well the people have spoken and the free game become Shadow Warrior 2. Here is my experience with the game, and how I make it work, on my not so great machine.
Shadow Warrior 2 installation, Wine setup, etc.
First of all Shadow Warrior 2 is not a small game. It has 5 installation files, which are 13,3 GB in size, total. After downloading, you need to rename files, because the installer won't find them. These are the filenames I used:
- setup_shadow_warrior_2_1.1.14.0_.exe - setup_shadow_warrior_2_1.1.14.0_-1.bin - setup_shadow_warrior_2_1.1.14.0_-2.bin - setup_shadow_warrior_2_1.1.14.0_-3.bin - setup_shadow_warrior_2_1.1.14.0_-4.bin
At first I installed the game in a simple, separate 64-bit Wine prefix on one of my partition. The game ran well enough, however there was a big problem. Flickering, and black things all of over the place, made the game unplayable. I quickly looked up on Winehq, that you need DXVK to solve this problem.
Soon I also found a video, that showed, how to setup the game in Lutris (which I love, seriously awesome tool).
I manually added the game in Lutris, and I used the following setup (based mostly from the video above):
- Wine version: esync-3.14-x8664
- Enabled DXVK, manually set to 0.80
- Use GLSL: Disabled
- No DLL overrides
- Some variables (System options): DXVKHUD 1, DXVKLOGLEVEL none, WINEDEBUG -all
I enabled the hud, because I wanted to see the framerate, and if DXVK works at all.
Shadow Warrior 2 rocks?
To my surprise Shadow Warrior 2 works for me. No visual problems so far. I played the first 2-3 levels, and the game looks good. I only use minimal stuff, but it is playable, and I was never really a graphics guy. I am not interested in multiplayer, probably needs a working Galaxy client.
Shadow Warrior 2 is free on GOG, for about the next 44 hours (about until Saturday afternoon in Europe).
As it turned out Superhot only placed 3rd, never really got a chance, but the GOG guys were smart and put the game on sale, and they did the same for Firewatch.